Juniper Networks announced its new MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platform along with several software innovations to provide the needed programmability, performance and flexibility for rapid service deployment in the cloud economy now and for years to come. Leveraging its vast experience with leading global cloud and service providers, Juniper is unveiling its fifth generation of the MX platform, which is now the industry’s only platform to deliver near-infinite programmability, cost efficiency and versatility with performance at scale. It combines the best of software- and hardware-based networking to equip carrier, cloud and enterprise customers for the evolving technological and business demands of next-generation services delivery.

Service providers are at an inflection point where the costs of operating a complex network that can host the new era of resource-intensive applications like 5G and secure SD-WAN-based managed servicesare overwhelming their ability to monetize them. Also, with the additional influx of machine data coming from IoT sensors, distributed telco edge and cloud computing, networks will become overextended if they remain static, particularly as current infrastructures have become too complex, expensive and vulnerable to cyber threats for service providers to manage the distributed scale and agility required for these new services.

A poll among Juniper service provider customers about the top challenges in being able to offer next-generation services like SD-WAN, IoT and 5G, found:

More than half (55 percent) of respondents ranked the cost of infrastructure build-out as the No. 1 or 2 challenge.

Nearly 40 percent of respondents ranked the complexity of orchestrating a distributed network at No. 1 or 2 challenge.

More than half (55 percent) of respondents ranked investment protection with data-plane programmability as the No. 1 or 2 desired feature set to solve those challenges.

To address these challenges and herald the next generation of routing for the coming wave of 5G, IoT and business services, Juniper designed its MX Series 5G Universal Routing platform with new silicon for near-infinite feature programmability, as well as open hardware-accelerated 5G Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS) for unparalleled performance, scale and freedom of choice, with additions to its universal chassis designed for operational simplicity, improved economics and increased agility.

With Contrail’s comprehensive automation and rich software management overlay capabilities, along with MX’s subscriber management, SPRING, and enhanced real-time performance monitoring telemetry data, the new capabilities enable customers to create and scale any type of service across a secure automated distributed cloud in a simplified way.

Juniper Penta Silicon: At the heart of the new MX Series 5G Platform is the new Juniper PentaSilicon, a next-generation 16nm service-optimized packet forwarding engine that delivers a 50 percent power efficiency gain (0.5 watts per gigabit) over the existing Junos Trio chipset, which leads to a 3x bandwidth increase for the MX960, MX480 and MX240. Juniper Penta enables end to end secure connectivity at scale with native support of both MACsec and an IPsec crypto engine – an industry-first – that can originate and terminate thousands of IPSec sessions without sacrificing performance. Additionally, Juniper Pentasupports flexible native Ethernet support (FlexE). Juniper Pentasilicon family will power the new MX Series 5G Platform for years to come by exponentially increasing performance, power efficiency and maintaining industry-leading hardware programmability that can address future innovative protocols.

MX 5G Control User-Plane Separation (CUPS) Hardware Acceleration: As service providers prepare for 5G deployments, the 3GPP CUPS standard allows customers to separate the evolved packet core user plane (GTP-U) and control plane (GTP-C) with a standardized Sx interface to help service providers scale each independently as needed for added flexibility and investment protection. The MX Series 5G platform is the first networking platform to support a standard-based hardware accelerated 5G user-plane in both existing and future MX routers to enable converged services (wireless and wireline) on the same platform while also allowing integration with third-party 5G control planes. Juniper expects this will lower total cost of ownership by as much as three to four times over software-based user plane implementations for MXs deployed in the field.

MX10008 and MX10016 Universal Chassis: Continuing service-scale innovation to usher in the next era of cloud, enterprise and carrier networking, the previously announced PTX and QFX Universal Chassis gains two new MX variants with today’s announcement: MX10008 and MX10016. Juniper’s Universal Chassis family reduces inventory management complexity by 80 percent and extends use-case versatility for operators with a revolutionary single-chassis design. The 13-RU MX10008 and 21-RU MX10016 Universal Chassis bring industry-leading and space-saving scale for edge routers at 19.2Tbps and 38.4Tbps, respectively. These new additions to Juniper’s Universal Chassis family improve per-slot economics for service scale at ~0.6 watts per gigabit, enabling customers to do more with less while simplifying network design and reducing opex. A variety of line cards and software are available to satisfy specific networking use-cases across the data center, enterprise and WAN.

The MX10008 and MX100016 will be available during the second half of 2018. Juniper PentaSilicon-powered line cards for the MX960, MX480 and MX240 will be available in Q1 2019. New CUPS support will be available in the first half of 2019.

Manoj Leelanivas, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Juniper Networks, said, “Cloud is eating the world, 5G is ramping up, IoT is presenting a host of new challenges and security teams simply can’t keep up with the sheer volume of cyber attacks on today’s network. One thing service providers should not have to worry about among all this is the unknown of what lies ahead. That’s why we’ve continued innovating our flagship MX platform to deliver more speed, flexibility, programmability and security capabilities, giving our customers the peace of mind they need as a variety of demands continue to put pressure on the network. We are building on our heritage of eliminating the biggest barriers to routing that have emerged over the past decade and providing a platform that can grow whichever way the world does. Our commitment to removing complexity from routing has made it possible for our customers to connect in ways that have changed the world.”